


Hot August Night

by Luthien



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-19
Updated: 2009-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-14 18:42:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthien/pseuds/Luthien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>John's still towelling himself dry as he wanders back into the bedroom, hair dripping water down his face and skin damp from the shower instead of sweaty from the summer heat for the first time in what seems forever. The first time since this morning, anyway. He pauses in the doorway to scrub the water out of his eyes, and then he looks up, drops his towel, and pauses some more.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hot August Night

John's still towelling himself dry as he wanders back into the bedroom, hair dripping water down his face and skin damp from the shower instead of sweaty from the summer heat for the first time in what seems forever. The first time since this morning, anyway. He pauses in the doorway to scrub the water out of his eyes, and then he looks up, drops his towel, and pauses some more.

Rodney's body is a thing of beauty. Of course, John already knew that, but somehow it still takes him by surprise at moments like this, coming unawares on the sight of Rodney sprawled naked across the bed. John knows Rodney's body. Hell, John'd seen almost all of it long before he ever thought he'd have the right to touch any of it. He's explored every inch since then, with hands and lips and tongue, intimate in ways he's never known anyone, but for all that, John still takes the opportunity to appreciate the view that's presented to him right now. It's not often that Rodney puts on a display like this. Not without lots and lots of encouragement and/or provocation. Mostly provocation. And even then Rodney likes to turn off the light long before John's ready.

Not this time. The wall lamps are dimmed but they provide all the light necessary for John to see everything he wants to see. The covers have been pulled down and left lying in a messy heap at the foot of the bed, and Rodney's lying face down on the sheet, arms folded loosely above his head. They're good arms with well-defined muscles, strong and capable like their owner. Nicely hairy, too, and unmistakably masculine.

As John watches, Rodney's biceps flex once, twice, and go still again. John's mouth goes suddenly dry, and he swallows hard. Surely he shouldn't still be reacting like this to something so simple, so basic? Not after all these months. He shouldn't still be taken by surprise by it, anyway.

He leans against the wall and lets his eyes drift down and along the broad sweep of Rodney's shoulders. They're solid and strong, those shoulders, like nothing else. And there's nothing like being pinned beneath them, pinned hard, while-

John swallows again, though this time at least he's expecting it.

His eyes travel further south, following the line of Rodney's back, limned in the soft yellow light, down to where it meets the perfect curve of Rodney's ass: perfectly strong like the rest of him and utterly, utterly perfect to push up against or to grab onto and anchor himself when-

John lets out a deep, shuddering breath. He's wetting his top lip with the tip of his tongue before he even realises he's doing it. He wants to kiss his way across everything he's looking at right now, every single bit of Rodney, so badly that it's like a physical ache.

Rodney stretches and shifts on the bed. "God, I think I'm dying," he moans into the pillow.

John grins a little wryly, and throws himself down on the bed beside Rodney. "You're not dying," he says.

"I might have known it would be something as mundane as heat exhaustion that got me in the end. I've never been so hot!"

"Yeah, you have, just last week on PX7-948," John reminds him, somehow resisting the temptation to make a comment about Rodney's general all-round hotness, partly because he knows that Rodney would instantly agree, partly because he also knows that another, silent part of Rodney would _not_ agree - and God, who else but Rodney McKay could ever perfect that particular mix of uber self-confidence and sneaking insecurity? But most of all because it really is just too damned hot to bother with anything tonight.

Almost anything. John lets his eyes wander down Rodney's body, just in case the view is somehow different close-up.

Rodney pushes himself up on his elbows then flops on his side, hardly sparing John a glance before he closes his eyes again and lets out a deep, weary breath. "I don't mean during the day, when the sun is out and it is, unfortunately, a reasonable supposition that dangerously high temperatures may occur, along with the unavoidable accompanying sweltering and sweating, particularly on certain planets and at certain latitudes. What I'm talking about is-"

"Nights like this," John finishes for him, scootching up close until he's all but touching Rodney and moving his head across the pillow so that he whispers the words right by Rodney's ear.

"Don't even think about it," Rodney says, without opening his eyes.

John's hand goes still bare inches from Rodney's dick and hovers there for a long moment, but Rodney doesn't say anything else. In the end, John lets his hand fall back against the sheet.

"I remember nights like this," John says, instead. "It reminds me of going to stay with my grandma during the summers when I was a kid. She used to let Dave and me drag our mattresses on to the porch and sleep out there on those really hot August nights."

Rodney slaps a hand over his eyes. "Tell me you did not just make a Neil Diamond reference," he groans.

"I did not just make a Neil Diamond reference," John says obediently, voice perfectly level.

Rodney lifts the hand from his face and sends John a disbelieving stare. "Try again," he says.

"You don't like Neil Diamond?" John enquires in mock-horror.

"Neither would you if you'd heard that album five hundred times before you made it as far as your eighth birthday," Rodney says, his jaw tensing at the memory. "And that's not any sort of exaggeration, either! You've probably never had to listen to it even once, have you?"

"Try six hundred times," John says with a wry grin.

"Oh, come on. You can't have been more than six years old when 'Hot August Night' came out."

"And what, you listened to it five hundred times before you turned eight because you loved it so much?"

Rodney waves a hand, apparently meant to indicate that he's conceding the point. "My cousin Denise had a copy, which was unfortunate, since her natural gifts included a strong tendency toward OCD coupled with a complete lack of imagination. Or taste, obviously. She listened to that thing constantly whenever she was anywhere near an available record-player. And again, I am not exaggerating. I don't think she bought another record until at least 1975. She used to come sit with me every afternoon until my mother got home from work, and she always played that album. Every Single Afternoon. For almost two years." Rodney groans at the memory and rolls on to his back, his head hitting the pillow with a thud.

"Yeah, me too," John says. "The sitter thing, I mean," he adds when Rodney's eyebrows shoot up. "I guess you could call her a sitter, anyway. She worked for my parents, used to keep an eye on Dave and me when no one else was around - which was most afternoons for a while there. She lived in an apartment over the garage and used to play that record all the time, so I got to hear it all the time, too."

"Except for when they used to pack you off to your grandma's," Rodney notes shrewdly.

"Yeah, except then," John agrees, keeping both his expression and his voice affable.

"And Grandma used to house you on the porch. I'm sure there'd be a law against that sort of thing these days."

"Maybe," John says, and swallows down hard on the tiny break in his voice.

"You enjoyed it, didn't you?" Rodney asks in a voice that sounds so certain of the answer he's going to get that John can hear the eye roll that Rodney doesn't make. The way Rodney asks makes it sound as if what John's just said is a commonplace thing, as if John brings up his grandma - and his brother - in casual conversation all the time.

"Yeah." John can't help grinning at the memory. "There was just us and our mattresses, the crickets chirping outside, and the mosquito netting hanging down from some sort of hook thing screwed into the underside of the porch roof. I thought it was really, really cool."

Rodney shakes his head. "Isn't mosquito netting something last seen - I don't know - in the days of the British Raj in India or something, or maybe during Doctor Livingstone's expedition to darkest Africa?"

"Well, if it was, no one told my grandma," John says, still grinning. "It was just... really, really cool. We used to pretend we were ghosts. Did you know that a mosquito net and a flashlight make the spookiest shadows ever?"

Rodney snorts. "Figures," he says, and closes his eyes again.

John doesn't have the energy to argue the point, so he leaves the conversation where Rodney dropped it and stretches out on his back, staring up at the indistinct - and not at all spooky, and really pretty boring - shadows on the ceiling.

Now that they've stopped talking, the still and the quiet - and the heat - quickly settle in around them. It feels oppressive, just like those nights out on the porch, after Grandma came out to take the flashlights away and they had to try to get to sleep enshrouded in the nets.

John's rarely been through a night quite like this since those long-ago days. He's experienced extreme heat, sure, plenty of times, but it's almost always been during a posting in a desert somewhere, and deserts mostly run to dry heat. And while dry heat in a desert war zone carries plenty of its own sort of unpleasant, it just doesn't compare with humid heat when it comes to stifling and sweaty and sticky skin and a whole heap of other less than enjoyable 'S' words.

There's no such thing as dry heat on Atlantis, and won't be for something like another 48,000 years. Right now, John would settle for a rackety old air conditioner set into a window, or even a fan. Yeah, a fan would be fine. But there's nothing, because of course there's no need for that sort of thing in Atlantis, which always maintains the perfect ambient temperature and relative humidity throughout every section of the city.

Except, that is, when it doesn't.

"So, still no luck getting the environmental controls back on-line?" John asks the ceiling.

He feels the mattress shift beside him and then Rodney's hot breath huffs against his shoulder. "Do you imagine I'd be lying here like this if they were working?"

"Depends." John can't keep the smirk out of his voice. Sometimes it's almost like Rodney walks right into these things on purpose.

Rodney makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a whimper. "Please, not now," he begs. "It's too hot even to think about anything that might involve skin touching skin. Like, ever again. _Ever_."

It's the way he says that last word, so emphatic and so emphatically McKay: that's what does it. That's what pulls John back from his careful contemplation of the ceiling, back to look at Rodney, stretched out all naked beside him, bare skin glistening faintly all over with sweat. And that's what pushes John into what he does next.

"Aw, c'mon, Rodney," he says, and leans in to plant a sloppy kiss in the vulnerable hollow at the base of Rodney's neck. Rodney flinches, then rolls to the far side of the bed. Of course John follows. He slings his left arm around Rodney's shoulders, the smooth skin on the underside sticking unpleasantly for a moment on the hot skin at the base of Rodney's neck. Meanwhile his right hand slides down between them to find Rodney's cock lying quiescent against his thigh. His lips end up just under Rodney's jaw, tasting salt and stubble. It's a position they found the very first time they spent the night together and they've been slipping back into it with hardly a conscious thought most nights since, even after they stopped having to hide and got a bigger bed.

Most nights, this position is the starting point for bigger and better things. Most nights, Rodney's body goes tense against John the instant John's hand touches him. John's fingers start stroking and teasing then, sliding up and along and down again before slipping lower to cup Rodney's balls a moment, never letting up until he gets the reaction he's trying for. He never has to wait long.

Tonight, Rodney tenses, but John doesn't move his hand. He just lets it lie there, and waits for the litany of objections and complaints to start up. But Rodney doesn't say anything at all at first. That's the first surprise.

The words he finally comes out with are the second.

"I'm not going anywhere," Rodney says quietly. Determinedly.

"What?" John says, sure that he's somehow heard that wrong.

"I'm not... You can annoy me all you like - and _please_ don't take that as a challenge - but you're not getting rid of me."

"Oh," says John, and immediately disengages himself from the tangle of their bodies and rolls on to his back.

This thing between them is so familiar - felt instantly familiar, like everything clicking into place, the very first time they touched with intent - and yet it's simultaneously new and strange and... precious in a way that makes John sure it can't last. Not because he doesn't want it. Never that. It can't last precisely _because_ he wants it, so much that it scares him. So he tests it, pushing and pushing at it without ever really acknowledging to himself that that's what he's doing.

He should have known that McKay would be too damned stubborn to let it - them - break.

As if to prove John's point, the next moment Rodney's strong hands are grasping his hip and his jaw and pulling him back across the bed and into a kiss that's as familiar as all the rest. Familiar, but never old, never boring. Never something John doesn't want.

Rodney's the one who finishes the kiss, just like he started it. It's only when his lips pull away that John realises that no other parts of their bodies are touching, and that Rodney's maintaining a close but careful distance between them.

"I hadn't realised that Johnny Cash did a Neil Diamond cover," Rodney says.

Whatever John might have been expecting Rodney to say or do next, that definitely isn't it. John raises one eyebrow and drawls, "Yeah, he did. Been digging through my iPod playlists again, McKay?"

And yeah, that's better. There's a comfortingly familiar flash of indignation in Rodney's eyes as he protests, "I wasn't digging. It was just lying there by the bed. What was I meant to do? Not look?"

John gives him a long, steady look. "So, what's your point?" he asks instead of all the other things he could say in reply to that. "Feeling disappointed that he didn't get around to doing 'Porcupine Pie' as well as 'Solitary Man'?"

John grins, but Rodney doesn't laugh. There's a serious question in his eyes as he looks at John.

The laugh dies on John's lips. He lifts his chin and meets Rodney's gaze, holds it there, doesn't even consider looking away. "I don't..." He clears his throat and tries again. "I don't listen to that playlist any more."

"Really?" There's a lifetime of meaning invested in that single word.

"Haven't for a while, actually." John scratches the back of his neck and hopes like crazy that that's enough.

Rodney smiles then. Thank God he gets it, because John doesn't know how else to say it. They lie there, just looking at each other. Rodney's smile is turning goofy now and Christ, John's going to have to kiss him again, going to have to do more than kiss him, and damn the sticky heat and the oceans of sweat and all the rest of it to hell.

On cue, a sudden gust of wind blows in through the window. They both turn to stare as the curtains continue to ripple in the breeze. A moment later, there's the welcome shock of cool air touching John's damp skin.

Rodney blinks. "Looks like we won't have to wait for the environmental controls to reboot in the morning before we get some sleep, after all."

"Sleep?" John says in disgust. "You can't think of any better way to pass the time than sleep?"

John pulls Rodney close again before Rodney has a chance to answer, but this time he doesn't even try to protest. Rodney's cock is already hard when John's hand slips down to find it, and it jumps against John's palm as he curls his fingers around it.

John grins, and starts with a kiss.


End file.
